Posted on 01/11/2002 10:16:34 AM PST by ThreeYearLurker
VANCOUVER (CP) - American actor Michael Moriarty, best known for his role on the hit TV series Law & Order, was in hospital Wednesday after he was beaten outside a Vancouver-area pub, a Vancouver TV station reported.
The station quoted sources as saying Moriarty, 60, was set upon early Wednesday in the parking lot of a Maple Ridge hotel after an evening of drinking.
The sources said three to five men attacked Moriarty and the attack was unprovoked.
Ridge Meadows Hospital in Maple Ridge would confirm only that Moriarty had been admitted.
A year ago, Moriarty appeared in Vancouver provincial court and avoided an assault conviction and criminal record by agreeing to court-ordered terms to behave himself as he continues treatment for alcoholism.
The Crown directed a stay of proceedings on an assault charge in a slapping incident involving his common-law wife.
The court placed Moriarty on a 12-month peace bond under a $1,000 surety and ordered him to have no contact with the complainant, Margaret Brychka, when he's drinking.
His lawyer said then that Moriarty was undergoing treatment for alcohol addiction and the assault was an "unfortunate incident" involving two people who had been drinking at different establishments that day.
Moriarty declined to talk about his treatment outside court.
It was the second time booze put Moriarty at odds with the law since he moved to Canada in 1996. He avoided charges after a bar brawl in Halifax in 1997.
Though his career has spiralled into relative obscurity, Moriarty is a highly acclaimed actor who reached the pinnacle of his career playing Ben Stone, the straight-arrow assistant district attorney on Law & Order.
But since leaving the award-winning series in 1994 and moving to Canada, Moriarty has appeared a troubled man.
He was arrested by Halifax police in 1997 after a drunken brawl in a bar. He later apologized for his behaviour, including a racial slur aimed at a black officer, and was not charged.
He moved to Vancouver soon after.
In some Vancouver court appearances on this assault charge, Moriarty appeared unsteady on his feet, unshaven and leaning heavily on a friend.
Moriarty was born in Detroit on April 5, 1941, and attended Dartmouth College in the early 1960s, majoring in theatre. He went on to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts as a Fulbright Scholar.
Moriarty was critically acclaimed for his role in the 1973 film Bang The Drum Slowly and won a Golden Globe award in 1978 for his role in the TV mini-series Holocaust.
By 1990, after a long string of critical successes, Moriarty was cast as Stone, the intense, incorruptible New York prosecutor in Law & Order, which grew into a perennial hit.
He left the show in 1994, citing then-U.S. attorney general Janet Reno and her campaign against TV violence.
In Canada, he has alternately shunned and stalked publicity.
In Halifax, he attempted to found a Republican party. He has considered running for mayor of Vancouver and as an independent presidential candidate in the United States.
Moriarty has an impressive list of accolades, including two Emmy awards and a Tony in addition to his Golden Globe.
Since moving to Canada, he has been nominated for Gemini awards for his work in the critically acclaimed 1998 television series Major Crime and the series Psi Factor.
He also writes poetry and has recorded a jazz CD.
By Michael Moriarty
web posted August 27, 2001
A group in Florida has expressed a strong interest in running me as their candidate in next year's gubernatorial election. The Democratic candidate is expected to be former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.
It would certainly make for interesting press coverage. Randle Patrick McMurphy vs. Nurse Mildred Ratched.
I now have here in Canada an Aboriginal friend-in-need and deed - an activist/journalist. This person could narrate the unfolding at the Cuckoo's Nest and see if the whole thing comes out like it does in the movies, with Ratched smugly victorious over a lobotomized dead white male American.
Hmmm, it's shaping up.
As much as I appreciate the respect which this political group has shown me, I would like some of my fellow American psychiatric patients -- since that is the constituency I'll be rallying for votes -- to more widely represent the wards and day rooms in America who feel the "hospital" wasn't run very well during the Reno/Ratched years.
That her director of hospitals, President William Jefferson Clinton, rarely made an appearance during her more decisive actions (such as the assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas) was perhaps an indication that another doctor of psychiatry -- some larger figure in the Marxist definition of sanity --, was directing the show.
I suspect that Dr. Fidel Castro of Cuba would like to make Florida the north wing of his Havana-based sanitarium and has encouraged his highly efficient truant officer, Ms. Reno, to preside over patients as recalcitrant as Elian Gonzalez and his American family.
The issue, however, is larger than a Free Cuba movement. It is the definition of American sanity itself.
The general impression of the party that has asked me to run as being less than mainstream certainly fits a McMurphy profile. Barring terminal campaign dirty tricks, we could have one helluva good time.
Tossing a possible campaign slogan into the hat: "We're crazy Americans, but we're real!"
That's the impression you get from Jack Nicholson's performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He certainly pulled a few votes from the American audience. Ironically, people are saying that I look more like Nicholson every day.
Yes, this could be shaping up into something more than a local election. It would be a debate over what defines traditional, American sanity.
Clearly, Clinton's success has driven the United States to consult a more Marxist Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible for psychiatrists on the symptoms of mental disease. If sanity is, in part, simply facing reality, then Americans have clearly adapted. What used to be Yuppies, during the Reagan years, are now Suppies -- socialist yuppies. Riding the glorious winds of American history which have blown so decidedly to the Left, almost all enterprising young Americans -- Republican and Democrat alike -- have reached unparalleled heights in their careers. Isn't that what America is all about? A Dow Jones over 10,000 points and a crime rate that dropped so quickly it's almost scary?
Growth without inflation. How do you achieve more profit without raising your prices? I'm not an economist. I'm just a reformed drunk currently residing in Duncan, British Columbia, but I suspect you'd have to lower your overhead some way or another. It can't be lowering the cost of labor, because there's been a record employment level during the Clinton years. We didn't hear the "sucking sound" Ross Perot warned us about, so wherever the "shortcut" came from, it must be so rewarding that business could afford to keep Bill Clinton looking good as president.
Things have gotten a little shaky under President George W. Bush. He seems to be unnerving folks at home and angering opinion-makers abroad. The return of a Clinton administration will look awfully good to Americans, if things continue as they are. But that's the democratic way, isn't it?
In our nation's political history, Democrats rule for a few terms and then Republicans. That the Bush and Clinton families seem to be playing volleyball with the Oval Office might be a bit alarming, but so far, Southern leadership has a great deal to be proud of. A Socialist Federation looks pretty good to any ambitious leader from the South. It's a bit like an ole plantation: the Socialist Federation Plantation.
That the Constitution and Bill of Rights are unquestionably the documents of a Republic and not a Federation has been rendered inconsequential, or -- as one reporter described President Clinton just before the Oklahoma City bombing -- "irrelevant."
Sounds like I'm running for President in 2008, doesn't it? Well, I'm sure Ms. Reno is thinking along those lines. So I figured I'd just cut to the "reality" of it all and tell you where I'm headed. If Hillary Clinton can waltz into my home state of New York and then whiz off to Washington with Senatorial credentials in her business suit, well, why can't I just stay in Florida as Governor while either Mrs. Clinton or Ms. Reno fulfill the Democratic Party's ultimate goal -- the permanent alteration of the United States into a Socialist Federation?
I want that to happen because, without enough rope, the Democratic/Federalist Party of America will not be able to hang itself in the eyes of human history.
The human race is a six-billion-headed attention deficit disorder. We're slowly forgetting the enormity of the Holocaust and require a body count that is at least in the seven figures before we conclude that something bad happened. (Genocide is being committed in Burundi as we speak.)
That no one in the mainstream media -- or any prominent historian, for that matter -- really wants to remind the Free World of the 120 million dead under Russian and Chinese National Socialism is that they mistook the driver of the German Socialist Panzer tank for the Panzer tank itself -- which was a Socialist Federation. Dictators Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin joined hands for 10 minutes because of their Federalist affiliations. When Stalin executed thousands of his military officers at Lubyanka prison, Hitler saw his chance to create the über-Socialist-Federation. Unfortunately, the Russians think Stalin stopped Hitler. I firmly believe that God and Mother Nature did more damage to the German regiments than did the shave-tail Russian generals.
The reality of American sanity starts with "In God We Trust." To a Marxist, that means Americans are on an "opiate." Bill Clinton doesn't come out and say that. However, when he testified before a federal grand jury, he basically said the following:
"I swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, Santa Claus."
And then he kind of winked. America winked right back.
"Right, Bill. God is Santa Claus."
Well, I happen to believe in my Creator. It keeps me, despite appearances, rather humble. Yes, I've partied like McMurphy, told randy jokes, entertained my fellow patients at various detox centers, and was the first American to describe Reno as Nurse Ratched.
Now the label fits her even more perfectly. After trying to turn off violent drama on American television, Reno performed a kind of electroshock therapy on the entire Free Cuban community, if only to show them who was boss. She betrayed her own sex to do it. Elian Gonzalez was in his mother's custody, even according to Cuban law. Mrs. Gonzalez' wishes that Elian live in freedom were irrelevant to General Reno.
You could call Waco a kind of terminal lobotomy. Nurse Ratched meant business. Apparently, a lot of Republican businessmen and members of the Waco Investigating Committee liked her decisiveness. Either that or she scared the hell out of them.
Wasn't Louise Fletcher really frightening in that Big Nurse role? So quiet-spoken. A bit like Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Jack Nicholson can be frightening. In A Few Good Men, he told Tom Cruise that the young man can't "handle the truth," when it comes to defending American freedom from the designs of Fidel Castro. I'm glad Nicholson scared me. It's a tough job to trust in God. Kind of scary.
When the Republicans on the Waco Investigating Committee backed down before the Attorney General -- even though portions of her testimony were described by The New York Times as "near-delusional" --, it made me doubt that I could ever be a member of the Republican Party.
Watching the Clinton administration dismantle a Republic before the eyes of Republicans confirmed my suspicions that the Republican Party was not good enough for the America I grew up in. That's just one of many reasons I moved to Canada. The late Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's brainchild - the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms -- fits a Socialist Federation. Canadians are not hypocrites. The American Constitution has nothing to do with the direction the United States has taken since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The USA is now living under the illusion of democracy. That sleight of hand is the only possible way a so-called Democratic Socialist Federation can survive. Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms. Institute martial law and you don't have the Civil War of 1860, you have a Communist state.
So, as you can see, I'll have to make up my own party. Presently, it is called 'The Realists: Not A Political Party but A North American State of Mind'.
To a Marxist, God and reality are a contradiction in terms. If this party that asked me to throw my hat into the ring, disillusioned Republicans, unwitting Liberals who are waking up, and the Free Cubans wish to merge into a resistance movement, then I offer them The Realists. We will approach the democratic process as if it still exists, but in Florida that's questionable. I think the United Nations had more to do with George W. Bush's election than did the people of Florida. Now that he's President, it shouldn't be too hard to appoint Reno as Governor of Florida, should it?
So, if the interested are willing to form a Realists' Movement (encompassing both Canada and the USA) and run me as a candidate for Governor of Florida with the ultimate goal line of the Presidency in 2008, I'm willing to risk electroshock and lobotomy, in addition to nefarious "dirty tricks" inherent in any political battle.
Please give me feedback. Presently, the friend I mentioned above is my adviser. This person and I will gauge any momentum and see if our Big Canoe here in B.C. can make it round the horn of Tierra del Fuego and be paddled up to the shores of West Palm Beach. If so, book a hotel room for me at The Breakers around the middle of next summer.
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe winning actor who has appeared in the landmark television series Law and Order, the mini-series Holocaust, and the recent movie Along Came a Spider. You can find him online at www.michaelmoriartyonline.com where you can purchase his latest CD, "Temporary Child"
I miss the old "Law and Order" days when he was the star and I wasn't forced to endure a political correctness brainwashing session each time I watched the show.
What you said.
I'm amazed at the number of people who noticed no difference in L&O's quality (or politics) after Moriarty left the show. AFAIC, his portrayal of the milquetoast career Nazi SS officer in Holocaust should have gotten him multiple awards.
It sounds like he hasn't quite hit bottom yet. I wish him well.
You can say pretty much the same thing about Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, in my opinion.
Just shows you how desperate many conservatives are to get ANY kind of affirmation from mainstream media personalities.
That may well be, unfortunately. I really don't care if a single "personality" agrees with my conservative beliefs. I know I'm right, and I don't need Barbra Streisand or Robert Redford to agree with me.
Then you are indeed a wonderful person and should continue to break your arm patting yourself on the back every time the opportunity presents itself.
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